


My love is the sun, lighting my life

by Nightalp



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Character Study, Falling In Love, Gen, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightalp/pseuds/Nightalp
Summary: Teleus' love was always quiet and steady and warm. Relius' was hot like a forest fire, burning fast and leaving dead earth and new life in its wake.Together, they managed something different - quiet and warm as friendship where anyone could see, and hot kisses and fierce hugs and scandalous lines whispered in the bed or scrawled in letters.
Relationships: Relius/Teleus (Queen's Thief)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	My love is the sun, lighting my life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/gifts).



> Hi! I hope you have a Merry Christmas!  
> My first idea when reading your prompts was SPACE!AU! You will find that this is not that AU (though I would have loved to write very alien characters ...) I had, however, more than one idea, with the other being a more [fun story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28311456).  
> Hope you like what my brain came up with and have a lovely holiday!

The first time Teleus saw Relius, he was but a shadow in the new queen's wake, overlooked even more easily than her in his servant clothing and huddled shoulders. The only reason Teleus noticed him at all was the server who, as blind as anyone else in the room, tripped over his foot and almost spilled wine over the floor.

Even this went unnoticed - or uncared for - by most, and Teleus himself only took note because he knew shadows, and the thieves hiding within them, and that you can never take your eyes off them.

Over the weeks following wariness turned to respect as he saw the boy - a slip of a young man, made slender and unobtrusive by growing up poor - advise the young queen - speaking rarely, and most often quietly only to her, and yet when he spoke his words had merit and he knew to bring them forth in such a way that one would make themselves out to be a fool to deny them.

Respect turned to friendship as their goals aligned more and more - a poor boy raised to importance by a princess wise enough to listen to him, and an only slightly older soldier turned into the captain of a hundred of men strong guard, both of them depending on their queen's power and intelligence to stay in power - and stay alive.

Teleus was no fool - they both knew what they stood to lose if Attolia ever faltered, their work to keep her safe and in power always carrying the trace of desperate self-interest in it, yet when they sat down in the evening, making plans to keep her out of her enemies grasp, they did it out of love for her, too.

And slowly, as years went by, he found himself falling for her shadow.

Growing up, Teleus had never understood the men around him talking about bedding this girl or pointing out that woman's wide hips and voluptuous bosom, nor had he ever been able to see how a man's broad shoulders could inspire lust. His love had always been a quiet, unobtrusive thing - a friend's laugh and the amused twinkle in his eyes when they managed to pull off a prank; a fellow soldier, pulling him close when he missed his family and sharing his stories with him. Nothing to write epics about, yet dear to his heart, keeping him warm even in the coldest of night. Hurting like the bullet wound that took Ronal's life.

It was Relius' smile that first made Teleus aware of what was happening - an open thing so unlike the guarded baring of teeth he offered to most anyone else, his eyes warm from firelight and affection, his whole body inviting. His heart fluttered in his chest at having it directed at him, and when Relius leaned forward, hand brushing Teleus’ as he pushed his refilled glass towards him, it made to jump out of his chest.

Teleus was not a jealous lover. He did not mind Relius' almost innocent - as innocent as any of them were anymore, especially with an occupation like Relius' - admiration for Attolia - not when he himself loved her as his queen, his respect for her growing with every day. Nor did he mind the lovers sharing Relius' bed.

Relius, he'd realized even before he fell for him, was like a butterfly: now here, and tomorrow there, and who even knew what the day after might bring? He fell in and out of love so often that Teleus could only stare and stand by in amazement, wondering at a heart that could love so hot and fast.

It was not love as he knew it and maybe that was why he could be content with what he had - shared evenings in front of a fire, playing chess or talking - or Relius trying to get him to appreciate poetry, as if he was a fine courtier and not a common soldier -, drinking wine. Some of these changed over the years - their chess board was no longer chipped with cobbled-together figures, Relius' clothing became fit to be worn by a courtly advisor, all precious fabric and modern cuts around a figure that had grown in both flesh and presence, and Teleus developed a liking to some of the more obscure poetry, yet all in all it still stayed the same warm camaraderie they'd shared from the start.

It wasn't until the fifth year of Attolia's reign that Relius turned to him one evening, smile challenging and eyes hopeful, and said: "You can kiss me, if you want."

Teleus' love was always quiet and steady and warm. Relius' was hot like a forest fire, burning fast and leaving dead earth and new life in its wake. Together, they managed something different - quiet and warm as friendship where anyone could see, and hot kisses and fierce hugs and scandalous lines whispered in the bed or scrawled in letters.

Teleus had no desire to stop Relius' affairs - there was too much fire in him, too much passion that Teleus feared would burn him out should it ever be focused on him alone, and anyway he did not desire to bed his friend and lover in that way, and in turn Relius never mentioned them to him except in passing.

In stories, a partner's affair is often what brings the lovers' downfall. Maybe Teleus should have known what would happen.

And yet he had been unprepared - unprepared for walking into Relius' study only to find his lover ready to take his life, to learn that it had been Relius' lover that had betrayed Attolia. It didn't matter that he had been stripped of his rank and arrested - all he could see were his lover's eyes, desperately pleading for mercy, for Teleus to let him kill himself, and all he could hear was his voice, cold and unbelieving, as he ordered his soldiers to arrest him anyway.

Looking back those - hours? Days? Years? - were a haze of imagining his lover being tortured, over and over. He had some vague recollection of Costis - steadfast, hot-headed Costis who reminded Teleus far too much of himself - trying to convince him of pleading for mercy, of seeing the men around him _that had not stopped Relius from making this mistake_ , of a brightly-lit ball room and his queen and the thought _He would not want her alone. Not now, not ever._

Having given up it had been too much to bear to have the king release his lover _two miracles cannot happen in one lifetime, I can not both find him and then be allowed to keep him_ and yet nothing had ever felt as real, as steady, as true as Relius' weight, cool and hurting but alive, in his arms. Nothing had ever felt as good as seeing those eyes, feverish and hazy, flutter open and land on him.

Many thought the king had bought Teleus' loyalty by getting him out of the prison. They were wrong; Teleus would have happily slit his throat if not for how much his queen needed him.

No, what had made Teleus give him a chance - a chance he'd stolen with all the subtlety of a Thief of Eddis, no thanks to Costis there - was him saving Relius, and the care and thoughtfulness he'd offered his lover. In his study, surrounded by all the trappings of his power, a vial of poison in his hand, Relius had seemed beyond hope. In a hospital bed, brought lower than ever since setting foot in this palace, in pain and stripped of his rank, he had been himself again, if changed.

Life after that was both the same and yet changed - not the least when Relius took on a ward. Teleus could handle assassins trying to kill his queen and nobles out for his head, could even, somewhat, handle a king he by turns respected and was exasperated by and admired, but. A kid?

Relius had taken other students before, often younger even than Pheris, and yet none that had ever wormed their way into his heart quite so thoroughly. Teleus was almost sure that he didn't even notice and yet there was no denying it, not when he came up in conversation this often.

Without ever exchanging a word with him he learned that Pheris was stubborn as a mule - "I think it _was_ a mule who raised him", Relius said, emptying his glass in one go - and desperately trying to hide his intelligence, of which Relius was sure he possessed quite a lot.

"Someone taught him that being smart will hurt him and so he stays quiet and dumb", Relius said, playing with a few pages of parchment looking like a gaggle of spiders had tried to draw mathematical formulas beyond Teleus' understanding. "And yet when something catches his interest he seems like a different person. Like ... like a pearl in an oyster, that you can see only if it lets itself open."

Teleus was not a jealous lover. But it was still good that Pheris was too young to be pursuing Relius.

It was good because it meant that when he had to accept that Relius was dead, that he had lost the one lover he had thought he could keep, it meant he had someone to share his pain with, even if it was a boy he had barely ever spoken a word to.

When Relius had been arrested his world had dissolved in hazy unreality. This time, the pain was just too clear, too sharp - hurting with every memory _I have to tell Relius this, he will know what to make of it_ or _I will have to remember the words, Relius will love this poem_ and every breath like icicles clawing at his heart, and were it not for his queen, his king, his soldiers, he would not go on.

Not when he lay in bed late at night, loneliness a cool partner, and missed the warmth and cuddles and having to fight for his right to a part of the blanket.

There was a poem Relius had once read to him - _My love is the sun, lighting my life, and without her I am empty and cold, barren like the earth in winter, waiting for her spring_ \- and that was the closest he would ever come to describing what it felt like to look up from his desk and see him standing there, a shadow backlit by the evening sun and yet brighter than anything he had ever seen.

There was a moment of disbelief - Relius was dead! Dead! - and another of thinking _Am I dead then, too, for this must be paradise?_ before he was done with thinking at all, just jumping from his chair and - somehow making it from his desk to the door, heart thumbing loud and heavy in his chest, and then there was warmth in his arms as they folded around his lover, and wetness on his cheeks, and Relius' sweet sweet voice - raspy and stern and beloved beyond the stars - chiding him for squashing him so hard all the while he was clinging to him just as tight, hands tight behind his neck and lips on his own, on his cheek and jaw and words falling from them - "I thought I lost you", "You are alive!", "I have you again" and "I love you, I love you, I love you" and he didn't know who said them but nor did he care, not when he was finally whole again.


End file.
